Cloud Hyperbole vs. Honesty – Do You Know the Difference?

June 20, 2018

Gartner is estimating cloud spending to hit $411 Billion by 2020. At that level of investment, people are bound to be cautious of all the hyperbole. Despite the technology being readily available for over 10 years, the cloud is still met with skepticism and false accusations. Cloud computing is one of those technologies where everyone has an opinion, and yet there is still a lot of confusion when it comes to picking through the facts and myths. Here we address a few of each.

4 Misconceptions about Cloud Computing

  1. You lose control of your data. You absolutely keep control of your data. What you do lose control of is maintaining and updating a physical server – no more hard drive swaps or equipment upgrades as your business size changes. You maintain control of how your data flows and who has access to it when.
  2. Cloud makes On-Prem obsolete. The cloud is very rarely “all-in”. While plenty of applications can run in the cloud, some need to remain on-premises because they’re too difficult to migrate as a result of internal dependencies and legacy coding. There may also be contractual limitations to what data is allowed to be hosted on a public cloud. But, having to keep some processes on-prem doesn’t negate the benefits the cloud can have. It can reduce the time and money needed to maintain your internal infrastructure.
  3. Cloud is an automatic cost reducer. This one is a major misconception. Your cloud solution may be more costly depending on the amount of data you store, the number of users, the number of applications, and your backup requirements. But even if your solution costs out higher than your on-prem, the cloud still has distinct benefits in the scalability to meet demand. As your demands change, you can scale your solution in kind. This means eliminating unnecessary build out overages that go unused in business lulls. And your security, upgrades, and maintenance are all built into your monthly payment, eliminating the need for your staff to be involved.
  4. The cloud increases exposure to external threats. Your security risks are similar, whether your data is hosted or on-prem. The cloud doesn’t eliminate the threat of data breaches or DDoS attacks. What the cloud does do is provide you economies of scale in accessing top-level security protections that you would likely not be able to fund internallyCloud providers have in-depth security plans that include encryption, sophisticated firewalls, and threat response to fend off most attacks.

4 Truths about Cloud Computing

  1. You still need an IT staff. As the cloud become popular, many IT people believed their jobs were in jeopardy. If a company moved everything to the cloud, they would not need staff to deal with IT tasks anymore. But that notion has not come to fruition. The cloud is a tool. It still requires people with strong IT skills to plan, implement and monitor. The cloud does not replace your IT staff unless you had people on staff installing hard drives and RAM all day. You can reallocate your internal support by moving your compute to the cloud and free your IT staff to work on more strategic goals and projects instead of installing Windows Server updates.
  2. There are more options beyond public cloud. The term “public” makes people nervous. While there are perfectly safe and effective public cloud options, many companies also employ private clouds as well as hybrid deployments. In fact, hybrid deployment is growing faster than both private and public as there is no one-size-fits-all solution and a combination approach is often ideal.
  3. Cloud makes you agile. In the beginning, everyone selling and buying the cloud touted the cost-savings. But, the savvy mind can see the forest for the trees and recognize that the true benefit is in speed to market. The ability to scale on demand and reach the market faster is a tremendous advantage that on-prem systems simply can’t compete with.

Corporate Technologies Group is dedicated to building you the right cloud solution.

Corporate Technologies Group is vendor-agnostic. We have strategic partnerships with over 140 different Cloud, VoIP, and WAN network service providers. We support clients from network design to implementation, post-installation support and remediation. We can ensure your infrastructure is built to suit your business needs now and into the future.

At Corporate Technologies Group, we provide our clients with a white glove service in evaluating, selecting, implementing, and post install support of their technology that runs their business. Our goal is to provide expertise to help clients figure out how to stay out of harm’s way and allow clients the ability to have one point of support along with taking away the pain points associated with technology.

In short, We make the complicated and risky technology decision simple.

Read our white paper, Cloud Migration Essentials, and I’ll explain just what Cloud Computing entails and how its evolved. Then I’ll talk about 6 critical issues you need to know about before you consider cloud computing for your company. Download below.


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